Thread: Some L.A. Times readers celebrate demise of the DREAM Act

Some readers celebrate demise of the DREAM Act

They say illegal immigrants are here to game the system and are a drag on the U.S. economy, despite a wealth of evidence to the contrary.

By Hector Tobar
December 24, 2010

When the DREAM Act died last week, some people treated it as a cause for celebration.

I know this because they sent me letters and e-mail. They were happy that the hardworking undocumented sons and daughters of illegal border crossers had been denied the right to become citizens of their adopted country.

A few called for Luis Perez, the subject of one of my recent columns, to be immediately deported. Perez, 29, managed to graduate from college and UCLA School of Law despite being an undocumented resident of Los Angeles since his Mexican parents brought him here as an 8-year-old.

President Obama and majorities in the House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate think Luis Perez and others like him deserve a shot at American citizenship. The DREAM Act would have provided a pathway to citizenship for young people who went to college or served in the military. But a very vocal minority stopped it from passing.

-Pauline Montion of Alhambra is a member of that angry minority. She wrote to say that she thought Luis Perez was a fine, "book smart" young man — but that she was still completely opposed to the DREAM Act.

"The DREAM Act is nonsense," she wrote. "Be proud to get educated in the U.S.A."

Hoping to understand her logic, I gave Montion a phone call. What I heard from her and other DREAM Act opponents left me deeply worried about California's future.

Montion and I had a very pleasant conversation, in English that she peppered with a few Spanish terms of endearment such as mijo, "my son."

"Soy Mexicana," Montion told me. Her mother, she said, was "una mojada" — ugly Spanish slang for illegal border-crosser.

Montion, born in Arizona, is now 78, a mother of six, grandmother of 13, and a retired shop steward for the Communication Workers of America, a union with a long and militant history.

Everything about Montion's life story suggested she should be more likely than your average American to support a law that would give the best and the brightest undocumented immigrants a path to residency.

But Montion told me she was opposed to the DREAM Act because she figured anyone who had lived in the U.S. long enough to go to college and learn English should be able to find a way to get off his duff and apply for citizenship.

Montion told me the young people pushing for the DREAM Act "wanted it both ways" — "to take advantage of our system" and to get the benefits of American citizenship before eventually heading back home to Mexico.

Having embraced a stereotype of today's illegal immigrants as dissemblers and manipulators, Montion is unwilling to embrace the legislative fix that would have allowed the brightest and most ambitious of them to become Americans in the eyes of the law.

Plenty of people think that way. They want people like Perez to stay in a legal category from which it's impossible to escape, no matter how hard they work or how smart they are.

"The very definition of illegal is dishonest," Diane Thornton, a greeting-card designer from L.A., wrote to me.

"In reality, it just allows more illegals in, including terrorists," wrote another of my correspondents, Brent Kenefick.

Kenefick works for an Orange County financial firm. He's an O.C. native who, at 47, is old enough to remember Disneyland E tickets and a state government that wasn't broke.

He believes Democrats are pandering to Latinos to win votes, and it makes him angry. In one e-mail, he described going to lunch recently for fish tacos. He noticed that "every single worker" at the taqueria was Mexican. How was that possible, he asked, given California's rampant unemployment?

"Don't you think there would be some white people who were recently laid off, or some college-age kids looking for part-time employment?" he wrote.

Like many others, Kenefick believes that the illegal-immigrant workforce is largely responsible for our budget crisis. Many studies have found the opposite — that the labor of illegal immigrants has a net-positive effect, because they spend money here, pay many taxes and avoid using many services.

I sent Kenefick one such study by the libertarian, conservative-leaning Cato Institute — but he was unimpressed.

I can understand how it doesn't seem to make sense for a state that's cutting jobs and budgets to give a boost to the sons and daughters of outsiders. But the alternative is to allow an entire group of people to continue living here as an undereducated underclass. Is that really what we want?

Supporting the DREAM Act as a first step to cleaning up the immigration mess made both moral and common sense.

Daniel Flaming, president of the Economic Roundtable, an L.A. think tank, said failure to pass the Dream Act not only went against our "long-term economic interests," but was "self-defeating in terms of basic fairness and the integrity of our social fabric."

For decades, Californians welcomed the "cheap, industrious labor" of undocumented workers, Flaming said. Those immigrants and their progeny have kept L.A.'s population and workforce from shrinking since the collapse of the aerospace industry in the 1980s — and they've "created wealth for the region."

Today, undocumented workers make up an estimated 16% of the L.A. County workforce. They have planted roots here, raised families. Thanks to their labor, we get cheaper fish tacos, cheaper childcare and cheaper car washes, Flaming said.

It violates basic American notions of fairness to simply kick them out now that the economy's gone south. Even Newt Gingrich has said, "We are not going to deport 11 million people."

So if you're not going to deport them, then what?

It's unhealthy for a democratic society to accept the presence of so many residents without full legal rights. Giving these working people and their children paths to become fully integrated into U.S. society would make California a richer place. But with the death of the Dream Act, comprehensive immigration reform died too, for the foreseeable future.

So we'll continue to live in this state of collective hypocrisy — lining up for tacos made by people we suspect don't belong here, but enjoying the cheap meal just the same.

hector.tobar@latimes.com

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me ... 057.column

I dont eat tacosa nd I sure did celebrate and even left a comment on the LA Times page expressing my joy. I dont understand how this guy ws able to publish this

Originally Posted by Creoleguy32

I dont eat tacosa nd I sure did celebrate and even left a comment on the LA Times page expressing my joy. I dont understand how this guy ws able to publish this

Because the Los Anus Times Is a rag, left wing, agenda pushing publication that panders to Illegals. They even removed the section ( Immigration) from the newspaper. They don't report news,they manufacture It to fit their far left marxist agenda.... Just my opinion